Your customer asked for emissions data. Here's what to send.
Large EU buyers now collect emissions data from their suppliers as a matter of routine. For a Western Balkan supplier, the quality of your answer quietly shapes whether the next order comes to you.
Why they're asking
Your emissions are your customer's Scope 3 — the value-chain emissions they must account for under the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), under voluntary climate commitments, and, for covered goods, under CBAM. Their reports are only as good as their suppliers' data, so procurement departments have started collecting it the same way they collect quality certificates: systematically, annually, and with consequences for non-response.
The request usually arrives as a questionnaire or a portal invitation, often mid-contract, often with a deadline. It is rarely optional in practice — supplier scorecards increasingly include emissions data availability, and suppliers who can't answer score worse in tenders and renewals.
What a credible response contains
Most supplier requests are satisfied by a company-level greenhouse-gas inventory, presented so the customer's team — and potentially their auditor — can rely on it:
The supplier data package
- Scope 1 emissions — fuel combustion in your boilers, furnaces and generators, your vehicle fleet, and process emissions where relevant.
- Scope 2 emissions — purchased electricity and district heating, calculated with the grid factor for your country, not an EU average.
- A stated reporting period — a full year, with monthly underlying records.
- Methodology and factors — which emission factors were used, from which source, at which version.
- Data quality, stated honestly — what's measured, what's estimated, and what doesn't reconcile.
- An English-language report — the person reading it sits in Munich or Vienna, not in your finance office.
Some customers go further — product-level footprints or installation-level data, especially for CBAM-covered goods. If that's your situation, start with the CBAM page; the data discipline is the same, applied at a finer grain.
Why spreadsheet answers get discarded
The common failure isn't refusing to answer — it's answering with a number that can't be defended. A single figure in a questionnaire cell, produced once with an online calculator and a European average grid factor, doesn't survive contact with a sustainability team that compares supplier responses for a living. What survives is boring: monthly records that match invoices, factors with named sources, and the same method applied period after period.
How Karbon360 fits in
Karbon360 turns your energy and activity data into a GHG inventory your customer's team can actually use — built for companies in the Western Balkans.
Month-by-month records
Guided data entry builds the monthly evidence base — energy, fuels, fleet — that turns a questionnaire answer into a defensible inventory.
The right grid factor
Scope 2 is calculated with locally accurate factors. In the Western Balkans this alone changes results by multiples versus generic tools.
Reports made to be forwarded
Reports and CSV exports in English, with the factor, version and calculation trace behind every figure — ready for your customer's verifier.
Frequently asked questions
Your emissions are their Scope 3. They report value-chain emissions under CSRD and voluntary commitments, and buy CBAM-covered goods under a carbon border price. Their reporting is only as good as your data, so procurement now collects it systematically.
Usually not to start. Most supplier requests are met with a solid Scope 1 and Scope 2 inventory plus methodology. Your own upstream Scope 3 becomes relevant later, as requests mature.
Rarely an immediate loss — usually a quiet downgrade. Emissions data availability is entering supplier scorecards, and non-responders score worse in tenders and renewals over time.
Undocumented estimates tend to be discarded or challenged. What holds up is traceability: figures backed by invoices and meter data, documented factors, and consistency between periods.
Got a questionnaire on your desk?
Send us what was requested and your sector. We'll tell you what a complete response looks like and how to build it.
Talk to our team